Digital Collections from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries

All Collections

Metropolitan Museum of Art Publications from the collections of The Metropolitan Museum Libraries and Metropolitan Museum Archives. All known publications from 1869-1949, along with a selection of later titles, are part of this collection. Additionally, thanks to the Museum's Digital Media and Editorial Departments, all full-text …

On January 19, 1946, The Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted a luncheon to commemorate its 75th anniversary. The speakers touched upon the history of the Museum, its place in New York, America and the world, and the development of future plans for the Museum.

This collection includes photographs of the luncheon and sound recordings …

This collection includes digitized auction sales catalogs in the public domain.

The American Art Association collection is a growing set of digitized auction catalogs from this very important New York auction house active from 1883-1923. The American Art Association was created to operate the American Art Gallery and to promote …

Digital and digitized auction catalogs for current and very recent sales. Please note that due to copyright restrictions, access to these catalogs is restricted to computers within The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

About the collections

The Thomas J. Watson Library is a world-renowned research collection with over 900,000 volumes. It is The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s central research library, and its mission is to support the research activities of the Museum staff; in addition, it serves an international community of scholars. Holdings reflect the Museum’s encyclopedic collections, with emphasis on European and American art, architecture, and decorative arts, ancient Near Eastern, Egyptian, Greek and Roman, Asian, and Islamic art, as well as an extensive collection of clippings and other ephemera relating to the Museum’s history.

The primary mission of the Watson Library Digitization Initiative is to expand access to the Library’s rare and unique materials by developing, supporting, and promoting a distinctive digital collection of these items.

The initiative will target materials that fall outside the parameters of other major digitization efforts, such as Google Books or the Internet Archive, and make them accessible to support the scholarly endeavors of Metropolitan Museum of Art staff and an international community of researchers.